I try not to be a party pooper but the other night I came home to such a cacophony of revelling from a neighbour’s house that I concluded there had to be a gathering of international gangsters, drug barons and hookers in my street. The thumping hip hop, screaming and glass smashing was coming from a house whose back garden borders mine at the bottom; so I crept outside to see if I could catch a glimpse.
I picked my way to the end of the garden in the dark, pulled myself up over the fence and braced myself to see hoards of Nike-swathed homeboys dripping in gold chains and spliffs. But when I got my nose over, all I saw was an open kitchen door and beyond it four smartly dressed professional types in their 30s — two men, two women — dancing around a CD player and waving a bottle of Sancerre. It was a bit disappointing. Still, this will be a piece of cake, I thought.
‘Excuse me!’ I called over the fence the next time there was a gap in the music. ‘Hello! Over here! Helloooo!’ I shouted as loud as I could. ‘Over here! Hello!’ Nothing. I ended up screaming ‘hello!’ about 50 times. It was excruciatingly embarrassing and meant that I was now the main disturbance in the neighbourhood.
After several humiliating minutes one of the girls figured it out. ‘I think it’s coming from over there,’ she said. ‘Yes!’ I gasped, now virtually hoarse. ‘Over here!’ They turned in my general direction so I said, ‘Er, if you don’t mind, would it be possible for you to close your back door?’
‘Is she complaining?’ the other girl said, drunkenly swaying and spilling her drink. ‘No, no! I’m not complaining,’ I said in a voice that tried to insinuate ‘look here, chaps, we’re all privately educated, why don’t you just close your back door and we’ll say no more about it, eh?’.
Their response was to hurl their glasses at me (one smashed against the fence just inches from my head) and scream, ‘F*** you, you mother-f****r! It’s the mother-f***ing weekend!’ As I fled the back garden, the sound of glass following me, one of the men, who looked like he was called Rupert, screamed, ‘Turn the f***ing music up! Yeah!’
I took shelter in the kitchen and ruminated on the night ahead. With the middle-class homies now irritated into a frenzy of committed noise-making I was unlikely to be getting any sleep. So at 2 a.m. I decided to call the noise people at Lambeth Council.
Yawning, I made my way through the options: press one for something or other, press two for something else which sounded a bit like the first thing, press three for…are there really three separate departments operating in the middle of the night? I pressed one and an Australian women took my details and promised that someone from the Noise Team would call me back within the hour.
I got into bed and tried to drown out the mayhem with an episode of Columbo. I must have fallen asleep despite the racket which then subsided because I was having the most blissful undisturbed slumber when the phone rang and woke me up. It was the Noise Team calling at 5 a.m. Was I still being kept awake by the neighbours? But even that wasn’t the most annoying thing.
A few days later, an envelope arrived from the Noise and Pollution Department asking me to complete a customer satisfaction survey. Question One: Are you male or female? Two: How old are you? Three: Do you have any long-standing illness, disability or infirmity? (I’m guessing that they mean other than insomnia.) Four: How would you describe your ethnic group? There are 16 choices here, although I notice that, if you are Chinese, you get only one box, whereas if you are black or Asian you get loads of boxes to choose from. Also, none of the ‘white’ boxes is strictly accurate for my purposes. There is ‘white’ mixed with a range of other races, shades and far-flung nations but no ‘White British Italian’. So I’m forcing myself to feel offended.
The next question asks whether I would like any of the information I have read so far in Braille, audiotape or other language including Twi or Yoruba. Or Navi, for the benefit of any characters from the film Avatar. (Just kidding.) Next: ‘How did you contact us? Telephone, in person, letter, email.’ (Carrier pigeon, telepathy or other psychic phenomena.)
Then, at question seven: ‘In general, how do you feel about the service you received?’ I ticked ‘neither satisfied or dissatisfied’ (sic). Somehow, I don’t think the word that describes my feelings is going to come up on this form.
Melissa Kite is deputy political editor of the Sunday Telegraph.
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